Facebook Glitch Let Some Users See Messages Meant For Other People

Update: The problem, which allowed some Facebook users to receive messages meant for other users, is being fixed.

It seems to be affecting mostly (and possibly only) early Facebook users who attended Harvard.

A Facebook rep tells us, "During our regular code push earlier this evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time. Our engineers diagnosed the problem moments after it began and are working to get everything back in its rightful place. While they fix the issue, affected users will not be able to access the site."

The image in this post is what the problem -- getting a bunch of messages destined for other people -- looks like in Gmail, according to one user, Zach Seward, who posted it via Twitpic.

Earlier: Something is going on at Facebook: We've received one firsthand report from a Facebook user that she is being inundated with hundreds of emails -- Facebook messages being sent from one member to another, but none of which she should be receiving.

This person is now locked out of her account.

A Facebook rep says the company will look into it and respond shortly.

Either there is some sort of back-end security glitch creating this problem, where peoples' actual messages are going into other peoples' inboxes, or some machines are spraying random messages at Facebook users. Either way, pretty creepy.

We aren't experiencing this problem with our Facebook account, and it does not seem to be a widespread problem. But this seems to be happening to at least a few people, as people are complaining about it on Twitter:

"facebook just went crazy, dozens of messages and random friend requests. anyone else?? and now my account is locked."

"Facebook was all whacky for a minute there. I sent messages to friends and they ended up going to random people I don't even know. Weird."

Our source reports, obviously embellishing a little: "I am getting every single message that is sent on facebook. My iphone is having a heart attack with hundreds of emails. These are things clearly being sent to other people… I need to alert someone to this asap. I don't think any of my info is being compromised but I don't want to have thousands of emails."